Re: starlink ixp peering progress

[Bill Woodcock <woody () pch net>]

> On Feb 27, 2024, at 08:54, Dave Taht <dave.taht () gmail com> wrote:
> One of the things I learned today was that starlink has published an extensive guide as to how existing BGP AS 
> holders can peer with them to get better service.

Yes, essentially every AS does this.  The ones that follow best-practices tend to be pretty uniform:

https://pch.net/peering
https://aws.amazon.com/peering/policy/
https://www.bytedance.com/en/peering
https://peering.google.com/#/options/peering
https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/peering/
https://www.lumen.com/en-us/about/legal/peering-policy.html
http://peering.ovh.net/

Starlink’s peering policy is straight-forward and follows best practices.  Then there are ones that get a little 
further afield, some of which can get kinda unusual in their fine-print:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/internet-peering/policy
https://www.verizon.com/business/terms/peering/
https://www.zayo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Zayo-Global-IP-Interconnection-Policy-Final-1.pdf
https://wholesale.orange.com/international/en/peering-policy.html

> I am curious if there is a way to see how many have peered already?

Well, if Starlink operates a looking-glass, sure.  Or you can derive an idea, albeit an incomplete one, from public 
data.  If any national communications regulators are paying attention, they may have placed a regulatory requirement on 
Starlink to make this public data, though it might have to be dug out of regulatory compliance filings, and might not 
be up-to-date.

> how many they could actually peer with?

That you’d need to script, though many people have.  We have an internal tool that tells us that about our own network, 
and I suspect pretty much every network large enough to have a dedicated peering team does likewise.  If you were to 
write such a tool for nonspecific use, we have public datasets that would show you who potential peers were at each 
IXP, and what routes / how many addresses they were advertising at each IXP…  Obviously if you’re learning Deutche 
Telekom’s routes in Frankfurt and Munich, it matters somewhat less whether you also peer with them in Karlsruhe, 
assuming they’re advertising the same routes everywhere, though it’s still good.  If they’re doing regional 
announcement, you might need to peer with them in different location to “collect the whole set” of their routes.  
That’s not so common now, though it was a fad for a while, maybe fifteen years ago.  I haven’t tried to quantify the 
degree of regional announcement lately… that’s a good small project for a student who wants to learn about routing and 
interconnection.

> And progress over time since inception.... is there a tool for that?

I think you’d have to throw together your own tools for that, or derive it from public data such as the routing 
archives that we, RIPE, and Route-Views maintain.

> Is there a better email list to discuss ixp stuff?

The two I know of are ixp-discuss () pch net and ixp-discuss () itu int.  Both are pretty quiet, though both have very 
helpful people on them.

                               -Bill

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